Chat Recommedations

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Have a client that wants to try out a "chat" contact us feature. (We are also having them use our Easy Contact email based system, but understand everyone's situation and market needs are different.) Since so many of (i.e., all) of our clients use Easy Contact, we have no idea of what to recommend for a "chat" based system...so, what says the miva community?

(Note: this is for sales assistance...no 'support' type features are needed or wanted.)

[alphabet]

I use LiveChat for past two years. Very happy.

[SNAGuy]

We use ProvideSupport

https://www.providesupport.com/

[GDesigns]

Majority of our clients are using livechat or zendesk chat https://www.zendesk.com/chat/pricing/#pricing

[Krsullivan]

We use LiveChatInc. https://www.livechatinc.com/pricing/ Its over kill for sure, but I really like the way it tell you which is the next chat to respond to when you have multiple chats going on at the same time, Easy visibility. No matter who you go with, they almost always have a 30 day trial. We tried out four on trials, installed them on some of our devs, and did some test runs.

[RTHOMASDESIGN]

Couldn't hurt to look into buying a chat plugin outright. With your skills, you'd probably even be able to re-brand the back-end. It's also significantly cheaper for the client (in the long run), as there are no monthly fees or additional per user fees.

Something like this:
https://livechat.mirrormx.net/pricing
https://codecanyon.net/item/php-live...32933?s_rank=2

Doesn't have quite as many features, but it's probably more than enough for what your client wants. Just a thought :)

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

We might do that if the client goes for it, that way we can add in some of the idea from Easy Contact...but for now we want something simple so they can see if its worth it.

Chat is great, but you HAVE to have the staff to back it up. Nothing frustrates people more than having to wait 5/10 minutes for chat. It's all about managing expectations: a phone call has to be answered within a minute, chat about 5 minutes max. Compared to email which can get you a "wow, that's quick" response even if its an hour or two.

[RTHOMASDESIGN]

We might do that if the client goes for it, that way we can add in some of the idea from Easy Contact...but for now we want something simple so they can see if its worth it.

Chat is great, but you HAVE to have the staff to back it up. Nothing frustrates people more than having to wait 5/10 minutes for chat. It's all about managing expectations: a phone call has to be answered within a minute, chat about 5 minutes max. Compared to email which can get you a "wow, that's quick" response even if its an hour or two.

Totally get it.

I've tried https://www.tawk.to/ a couple times, and it works well (especially if you just want to demo a chat service for them). It's completely free, unless you want to remove their branding / whitelabel it.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Cool thanks for additional suggestions and thanks to others...we'll probably try one of these out next week. They are running a test with Easy Contact.

[entrepre7]

Bruce how was the test run go with Easy Contact? What do you recommend for chat with Miva?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Haven't checked in yet. As for chat, we'll be trying Live Chat based on Sabine recommendation and then maybe tawk based on Rob's. If you want, we can set you up with a 30 day trial for Easy Contact.

[lesliekirk]

Question - for those of you using LiveChat - how are you improving the drag it causes on your Core Web Vitals? LiveChat insists it's not a problem but Google does...

[William Davis]

I noticed Facebook offers a free Chat widget that is customizable. Don't know if that is a good idea or not.

[RTHOMASDESIGN]

Question - for those of you using LiveChat - how are you improving the drag it causes on your Core Web Vitals? LiveChat insists it's not a problem but Google does...

Are you using GTM? If so, depending on how the chat is implemented you could play around with triggers (delay the app) so that it doesn't impact initial page load as much.

[lesliekirk]

Are you using GTM? If so, depending on how the chat is implemented you could play around with triggers (delay the app) so that it doesn't impact initial page load as much.

Yes the site is using GTM and interesting. I've also reached out to the LiveChat community, got a reply from a LiveChat member letting me know they are aware of the situation and are working the issue. In the mean time...